One blast, five lives

First of two parts | Part two
Nov. 21, 2005, was a cool fall day at the base near al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, and the five men from Michigan had spent the morning meeting with Iraqi police forces.

Afterward, they set out to patrol the town of fewer than 20,000 people just a couple of miles away. Their assignment: Report back on the "atmosphere."

Timeline

FEBRUARY 2005: Army National Guard Sgt. Joshua Youmans, Sgt. Spencer Akers, Pfc. John Dearing, Sgt. Matthew Webber and Sgt. Duane Dreasky, all from Michigan, are called up and start training for duty in Iraq.

JUNE 2005: Their unit, Saginaw-based Company B of the 125th Infantry Regiment, leaves for Iraq.

NOV. 4, 2005: In the first fatality within Company B, a land mine kills Army Spc. Timothy Brown, 23, of Cedar Springs.

NOV. 21: An improvised explosive device hits the five Michigan men's Humvee. Pfc. John Dearing dies instantly; the other four men are pulled, badly burned, from the wreckage.

BY NOV. 23: The men are flown to a German hospital.

NOV. 24: On Thanksgiving night, all four men arrive at Brooke Army Medical Center's burn unit in Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

How the attack happened

On Nov. 21, Youmans, Akers, Dearing, Webber and Dreasy were in the last of four armored Humvees returning from a midday patrol in al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, a couple of miles from their base.

Traveling through a lush farming area on a tree-lined dirt road, the returning caravan reached a point less than a mile from Camp Habbaniyah. It's not known how far apart the vehicles were.

As the fourth Humvee passed, an insurgent remotely detonated an improvised explosive device. The blast killed Dearing and badly injured the other four men.

Within 30 minutes, soldiers in the other Humvees and more that were radioed in evacuated the wounded men to a medical base across from Camp Habbaniyah.

Flight for life

Doctors raced to save the four wounded men. Within just four days (Nov. 21-24) they were stabilized at a medical base in Habbaniyah, airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, then flown to San Antonio, to the Brooke Army Medical Centeris burn unit in Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

All five of the Michigan soldiers attacked on Nov. 21 received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

They spent much of the day at a large indoor marketplace packed with trinket vendors.

Then the five men, with their body armor and guns, crammed into the last of four enclosed, armored Humvees and headed back to base in midafternoon. Along a dusty road dotted with palm trees and irrigation ditches, the caravan trailed through the lush green farming area of the Euphrates Valley.

The men's ages spanned 14 years. They hailed from all over the state. They came from different worlds and had different dreams.

Less than a mile from safety, they rolled straight toward the most lethal weapon in the Iraqi insurgents' arsenal.

They might as well have driven into hell.

The bond

They were joined by a mission in Iraq:

Sgt. Joshua Youmans, a first-time father from Flushing Township, counting down the days to meeting his newborn daughter.

Sgt. Spencer Akers, days away from buying his first house.

Pfc. John Dearing, a newlywed whose bride of five months waited at home.

Sgt. Duane Dreasky, an ex-football player who talked about the cross-country trip he would take with his wife.

Army National Guard Capt. Anthony Dennis was the group's commander.

"That day, it's like Dec. 7, 1941," said Dennis, evoking Pearl Harbor. "It will live in me, and more than likely in the rest of the guys deployed with us, forever."

Signing up

Youmans was famous for his trademark, high-pitched "crazy laugh" but quiet around people he didn't know. His lifelong dream? To be a police officer. In 2003, he told wife Katie that he wanted to join the Army National Guard out of respect for the job.

"He said, 'If you don't want me to, I won't,'" Katie Youmans said. "But I supported him because we always supported each other.

"This was something he really wanted to do."

On his 25th birthday, days before he was sent for training for Iraq, he got big news: Katie was pregnant.

The 2003 graduate of Oscoda High School loved baseball, hunting with his dad and being a free spirit.

Born in a military family, he joined the Reserves when he was still in high school. Then, home after a tour of duty in Egypt, he volunteered to go to Iraq.

One day while on a nine-day leave from training, he donned his olive class-A uniform, and he and sweetheart Amanda, neither one old enough to gamble, got married in her parents' backyard.

Instead of a honeymoon, Dearing left for Iraq a week later.

Everyone knew Duane Dreasky was born to be a soldier, despite his teddy-bear heart and even before he started wearing fatigues to school.

He was always trying a new adventure: scuba, skydiving, martial arts.

But knee problems kept the burly former Walled Lake Western football player and wrestler from joining the military.

It took desperate letters to local elected officials to get him into the Michigan Army National Guard in 2003, a dream come true. After a year in Cuba, he volunteered to go to Iraq.

"He literally volunteered and begged and pleaded until they said yes," mother Cheryl said. "He wanted to go on a mission."

And then, Duane, 30, promised he would take Mandeline, "Mandy," his best friend and wife of nearly six years, on a trip across the country.

Spencer Akers figured if he went to war, fewer married men would have to.

The 1988 Pine River High School graduate, a jokester but passionate about the military, was a 1991 Gulf War vet almost 35 years old when he volunteered to go to Iraq.

"He's been a soldier since he was 5 years old," father Don said.

Before leaving for Iraq, Spencer worked part time selling big-screen TVs at the Best Buy store in Traverse City, where he planned to buy his first house.

Matthew Webber was "the pretty boy," president of the student council, a National Honor Society member, a three-sport athlete and member of a college fraternity.

He was earning a business and marketing degree at Western Michigan University, where everyone who knew him liked him.

In 1999, he joined the National Guard to earn money for college, never expecting to go into active combat. But six years later, at age 22, he did.

First taste of death

The five men - some of them "weekend warriors" together in the Guard - were all sent to Iraq in June 2005 with the 140-member Saginaw-based Company B of the 125th Infantry Regiment.

Back home, families would sit near computers into the night and early morning, never wanting to miss a moment their soldiers were online.

"He would talk just like a regular person," Dreasky's mother, Cheryl, remembers. "He'd say, 'I just got in from work, another day down.'"

Akers would write to his father, Don: "I don't care what the media says. The job is being done here. It just won't be done overnight."

Dearing asked for sweets to hand out to Iraqi kids and sent his new bride pictures of himself - watching for enemies on a guard tower, on a walkie-talkie, with comrades. "I love you," he wrote in a caption.

On Nov. 4, a land mine detonated near a Humvee. The resulting death of Army Spc. Timothy Brown, 23, of Cedar Springs was the first in their company.

"They were in a very, very dangerous area, and they were doing a lot of very challenging work. It was very clear they were taking good care of one another," said Maj. Gen. Thomas Cutler, head of the Michigan National Guard, who visited the men in Iraq and saw pictures of all of the enemies they helped seize.

"They were proud of that work because they were making the streets safer."

The blast

Camp Habbaniyah is tucked between Fallujah and Ramadi in central Iraq, about 45 miles west of Baghdad in one of the most treacherous parts of the country. A big part of the 125th's mission was to rebuild Iraqi police forces and capture and kill insurgents and terrorists.

"These guys were helping make the country a better place," said Dennis, their commander.

Among the perils they faced were improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs, the insurgents' weapon of choice. Easy to make, hard to spot and wickedly effective, they are a main cause of soldier deaths and injuries in the Iraq war.

On Nov. 21, with the soldiers on the road back to their base after patrol, an unseen enemy triggerman watched the convoy and set off his IED as the fourth Humvee passed. The explosion blazed through the vehicle and its five men.

Dearing died instantly. Furious flames ravaged his four comrades with horrific burns, some bone deep.

"I'm still having trouble talking about it," said Dennis, who was in the second Humvee. "It was devastating. They were all part of my family."

What happened next is a blur.

Other Humvees were radioed in. Fellow soldiers quickly evacuated the men's scorched bodies into vehicles in the midst of rabid flames.

Mostly conscious, the men's faces showed courage as they were loaded into other Humvees, the doors shutting behind them.

"It was a very significant, traumatic experience for every single one of us ... that's been burned into our memories," Dennis said. "When they say 'band of brothers,' there's no comparison to it. There will always be that bond.

"I could not have asked for a better group of guys."

Several men stayed back to search the area. (About a month later, a sister company detained a suspect, military officials said, but any outcome is unknown.)

It took just 30 minutes to get the wounded men to a medical base in Habbaniyah. There, they received prompt medical care, which most likely included immediate oxygen and shock treatment.

Charred areas of their skin were wrapped with dry, sterile gauze.

"The trauma platoon said that getting them there so quickly is what extended their lives," Dennis said. "It was already disastrous, but they said if they had stayed out there any longer, it would have been even more disastrous."

The men were treated and stabilized at the base before being airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany.

Within days, the men - covered in bandages, all in critical condition - were taken back to the United States together by a specially equipped Air Force C-17 transport plane that has been described as "an intensive care unit in the sky."

Doctors and nurses aboard its flights treat badly burned soldiers throughout the nearly 12-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean. An ambulance meets the plane at San Antonio International Airport, about 15 minutes away from Brooke Army Medical Center's burn unit in Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

On Thanksgiving night, the four men arrived at this state-of-the-art military burn unit, where many burn victims from Afghanistan and Iraq start down a long road to recovery, even in the best-case scenario.

A new life

Back in Flushing Township, Katie Youmans was adjusting to life as a new mom.

Time off from youth ministry at a Chesaning church was spent changing diapers, feeding and trying to set a sleep schedule for her and Josh's new daughter, MacKenzie.

It was about 10 a.m. in Iraq nearly two months earlier that she had sent Josh an important instant message: "My water just broke."

Hours later, the couple became parents to a healthy baby girl with thin, butter-blond strands of hair and ocean-blue eyes.

In the delivery room at Hurley Medical Center, Katie Youmans' best friend, Krista Frame - who had attended Lamaze classes with Katie - was at her side instead of her husband.

But when Josh Youmans called the hospital room from halfway around the globe, he stayed on the phone until he could hear his newborn's cries.

From his post more than 6,000 miles away and in a time zone 12 hours ahead, Josh Youmans watched on a Web video camera as MacKenzie slept in her bassinet. He proudly showed off pictures from the more than 200 e-mailed to him.

Katie Youmans had spent less than eight weeks bonding with her baby girl, who still hadn't met her dad, when Army officers dressed in green, basic-duty uniforms came to this tiny township looking for her.